Buy Me Some Sushi and Crackerjacks? MLB Goes Global

With the baseball season hastily approaching, get ready for hot dogs, cracker jacks—and sushi?

In this day and age, if you visit your local stadium there is a very good chance you’ll find sushi being served along with chow mien, a burger on a donut, spaghetti and, thank god, even your traditional hot dog.

What is baseball becoming? What happened to bleeding Dodger blue? Do you remember the time before Barroid Bonds and Roidger Clemens? When baseball was about father and sons, seventh-inning stretches, and catching a foul ball.

Vaguely, through the cloud of pyrotechnics and sheath of corporations I remember a time. The year was 1989, and I collected every single Tops baseball playing card to have a complete annual set. Nowadays, do kids even collect baseball cards? Or, have dragons battling wizards replaced sports memorabilia of today?

Going to a baseball game use to mean something—the experience of going to Candlestick Park, Shea Stadium, or the Astrodome. Now we are ruled by corporations and enter stadiums such as PetCo Park or Citizens Bank Park as zombies, forgetting the smell of the grass, the hollering of peanut vendors, and the thrill of doing the wave.

Sooner or later we may be going to see the Florida Ford Mustangs or Seattle Sprint Cell-Phones and you may just hear, “Get your Sushi, here, Get your Sushi,” making peanuts just a fond memory of your childhood.

Now that games are played in China and Japan, is the Great Wall going to be the new Green Monster? Go Global! Think Globally! Everyone is saying it and the MLB decided to jump on that bandwagon, but is that the right thing for the great All-American pastime known as baseball.

By tearing down old stadiums, changing hot dogs to sushi, and moving games to countries where they get played while Americans sleep, are we losing the magic that a baseball game, or even the game of baseball, once had?

The short answer is no. Keeping the nostalgia of the game is up to us, the fans. If Baseball is life, life is ever changing. This is the realization I had to come to. Yes, you can get spaghetti, but I will always buy my hot dog with mustard and kraut. Yes, fireworks go off from a home run, but you can still catch that ball. And yes, games are being played around the world, but now you have more people to do the wave with.

Change isn’t bad and nostalgia isn’t gone. Things are just different, you can still enjoy the game the way you always did and now people who didn’t enjoy it like you can enjoy it in there own way. There are just more people to bleed blue now.

When everything is said and done, and the MLB continues it’s globalization of baseball, I’ll be getting up at 3:00 A.M. to watch the Red Sox play in Tokyo and enjoy the game. What about you?